“For the Apple faithful,” writes MarketWatch‘s Russ Britt, “the decade was a virtual orgy of technological wonderment… Investors who plunked down $1,000 on Apple stock at the end of 2000 would have seen it grow to nearly $43,000 by the end of the decade.”

For those reasons and more, Apple’s AAPL CEO has been named MarketWatch’s CEO of the Decade.

MarketWatch is a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow Jones, which in turn is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. NWS.